Ear­li­er this week, Michèle Fitous­si wrote about her fas­ci­na­tion with Hele­na Rubin­stein and her deci­sion to write the biog­ra­phy Hele­na Rubin­stein: The Woman Who Invent­ed Beau­ty. Today she dis­cuss­es the sources she used to write the biog­ra­phy. She will be blog­ging here all week for Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and MyJew­ish­Learn­ing.

Hele­na Rubin­stein wrote – or rather com­mis­sioned – two auto­bi­ogra­phies that mere­ly serve to per­pet­u­ate her leg­end, and there­fore can­not real­ly be trust­ed… But they are enough to get a good idea of his extra­or­di­nary woman. There are also a cou­ple of biogra­phies writ­ten about her, as well as the mem­oir of Patrick O’Higgins, her sec­re­tary dur­ing the last 20 years of her life. His words are at times rather bit­ing – it must be said she didn’t treat him espe­cial­ly well – but he remains affec­tion­ate, which make this account worthwhile. 

In Paris, I had access to the numer­ous archives of the Rubin­stein com­pa­ny; I was able to sift through 14 box­es of mem­o­ries – Dora Maar’s pho­tos of Helena’s apart­ment in Paris by the Quai de Béthune, news­pa­per clip­pings, press files, tran­scrip­tions of radio inter­views, reports of the brand­ing strat­e­gy in the 1950s, and hun­dreds of photos. 

Once in New York, I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to vis­it the Foun­da­tion before it closed its doors and auc­tioned off its col­lec­tion of paint­ings. She had had her por­traits done by Sal­vador Dali, Marie Lau­rencin, Jacques Helleu, Chris­t­ian Bérard. Helena’s son’s daugh­ter-in-law Suzanne Slesin also had a great col­lec­tion of archives which she has com­piled in a beau­ti­ful book enti­tled Hele­na Rubin­stein: Over the Top. I met her on sev­er­al occa­sions and she told me about her fas­ci­nat­ing encounter with Madame Rubin­stein in the ​’60s, when she was only 16 years old, and how daz­zled she was upon her vis­it to Helena’s apart­ment on Park Avenue. It was at once baroque and a com­plete mess – a lit­tle ​‘over the top’ at times – but her style was unbe­liev­ably auda­cious, as she com­bined for exam­ple ​“Negro art” with con­tem­po­rary fur­ni­ture in a way no one would ever dreamed of doing at the time. 

I spoke with some of her rare fam­i­ly mem­bers who are still alive, includ­ing a young cousin who escaped the Shoah with her moth­er and whom Madame took in after the war and the son of her direc­tor in France, Emmanuel Ameisen, who was also her first husband’s nephew. 

Trawl­ing through the geneal­o­gy sites online I man­aged to find iden­ti­ty papers, pass­ports, and many news­pa­pers of the time, both Amer­i­can and Aus­tralian. Her career tru­ly began in Aus­tralia, that’s where her first inter­views were con­duct­ed, her first adverts placed. One of which I found was dat­ed back to 1903, fea­tur­ing an actress prais­ing Helena’s ​‘Valaze’ cream – the true pre­cur­sor to ​‘Because I’m worth it.’

I would have liked to learn more about her first hus­band Arthur Ameisen, who went under the alias of Edward Titus, an intel­lec­tu­al, jour­nal­ist, and art lover, who set up the book­shop on Delam­bre street in Mont­par­nasse and pub­lished Kiki’s Mem­oirs by Kiki de Mont­par­nasse as well as the French trans­la­tion of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He too was a fas­ci­nat­ing char­ac­ter. He was a promi­nent mem­ber of the ​‘Roar­ing Twen­ties’ crowd, and influ­enced his wife’s artis­tic taste to a great extent. But what was he up to before they met in Aus­tralia and then got mar­ried in Lon­don? I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet his sec­ond wife in Cannes, Eri­ca, who was 38 years his junior, but sad­ly she was suf­fer­ing from Alzheimer’s, and I was unable to glean much infor­ma­tion from her.

Michèle Fitous­si was born in Tunisia to French par­ents, and has lived in Paris since the age of five. She worked as a jour­nal­ist at Elle mag­a­zine for years, inter­view­ing world lead­ers in areas as var­ied as pol­i­tics, human sci­ences, sports, lit­er­a­ture and the media. She is the author of screen­plays, fic­tion and non-fic­tion, includ­ing the inter­na­tion­al best­sellersSuperwoman’s had Enough and The Pris­on­er. She also co-wrote Stolen Liveswith Mali­ka Oufkir, which sold more than a mil­lion copies through­out the world and remained on the New York Times best-sell­er list for 25 weeks after being stamped as an ​“Oprah Book” by Oprah Win­frey. Her newest book, Hele­na Rubin­stein: The Woman Who Invent­ed Beau­ty, is now avail­able. Her forth­com­ing book about the 2008 ter­ror­ist attacks in Mum­bai will be pub­lished in France this September.

Relat­ed Content:

• Essays: The Research
• Ger­ald Stern on ​“Writ­ing Biog­ra­phy: The His­to­ri­an’s Chal­lenge”
• Essays: An Artis­tic Eye